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Reviews. . .
Read
Brett Johnson's fine feature article on "The Oaks" from the Ventura
County Star
HERE.
A private wonderland
by
Barry Smolin
Having encountered the adult Charlie Bogle in Rip Rense's
debut novel The Last Byline,
readers will find it illuminating to meet the future journalist in
the author's wholly satisfying prequel/follow-up novel The Oaks.
As in The Last Byline,
Bogle is very much an Atlas figure, his name a fitting anagram for
Globe, his rounded shoulders, ever slouching toward Bethlehem,
bearing the weight of a cockamamie universe. To learn that this
mythic conflict began myriad dysfunctions ago, with the emotionally
hobbled father figure and the evil stepmother drawn from ancient
folklore yet modern and real at the same time, always rooted in
rootlessness, completes our understanding of Charlie Bogle's eternal
search for home.
In the evolving
childhood and adolescence of young Bogle, alienation becomes an
art form. Charlie finds his strength, his 'oaks', in the fruits of
human creativity, high and low, from the classical majesty of
Puccini and Beethoven to the wickedly witty cynicism of W.C. Fields.
But most of all the awesome cosmos of The Beatles is what really
rocks the struggling youth's conscience with its sublime mixture of
rebellion and contentment, the safe harbor of unmitigated
self-expression.
The Beatles transcend pop
music and become, for Charlie, a signpost to the richness and
authenticity he craves in the real world. Essentially motherless and
desperate for his father's approval, Bogle learns early on how to
fend for himself, communing alone with nature, entranced by the
expanse of a pre-natal suburbia, still rugged with wildlife and
unpaved openness, generally unwelcome in the house, burdened with
the ongoing mission of staying out of everyone's way, constructing a
private Wonderland (or, more properly, a Shtikenbooby), a
self-contained galaxy of his own devising.
The brilliant irony
(and ultimate lesson) of The Oaks is that 'home' really has
nothing to do with 'place,' despite Charlie's deep sensitivity (and
attachment) to the nuances and power of place. Home is an internal
state, a sense of connection and belonging, which Charlie finds in
music, in poetry, in his lonely bedroom, in his meager collection of
precious possessions, in Sweetie, in Trudy, in a panorama of
interactive mythologies, but perhaps most symbolically in those
great bulwarks of immovability, earthbound yet ever aspiring
heavenward, that grand cluster of roots and branches called 'The
Oaks."
Smolin is a musician, celebrated high school English teacher, and
longtime host of "The
Music Never Stops" on KPFK-FM.
A pure delight
by
Dave Lindorff
The last
time we saw Charles Bogle, he was dealing with the collapse
of a once proud newspaper, in Rip Rense’s masterful novel The
Last Byline.
Now, in Rense’s prequel,
The Oaks, we get to learn where Bogle came from. And what a
screwed-up family he had: parents separated, mother a nutcase who
couldn’t care for her own kid and had to send him to his alcoholic
father, and to top it all off, an evil stepmother who would make
Snow White positively grateful for her witch of a mother.
What rescues The
Oaks from being simply a depressing tale of domestic
disintegration, though, is the amazing resilience of its
protagonist. Even as he is clobbered by one disaster after
another—his mother dumps him, his father betrays him at every turn,
his stepmother sucks every pleasure out of his life, even denying
him instrument lessons when he wants them—young Bogle never
surrenders to despair. Somehow, each defeat seems to make him more
resilient. What also makes this seeming downer of a book into a pure
delight to read is the gentle humor that pervades it, and the sheer
honesty of how it puts us inside the head of an angst-ridden
teenager.
Rense clearly hasn’t
forgotten what a nightmare it is to be tormented by school brutes,
or to have your family pull you out of your school and your
community and insert you in a strange new school. Neither has he
forgotten the embarrassment of getting an erection during your first
slow dance, or of having acute gastrointestinal difficulty just as
you’re about to receive your first kiss.
But at the same time,
the author also still remembers, and conveys with conviction,
the sheer joy of climbing into an ancient old tree, or of listening
for the first time to a new Beatles release. The Oaks offers
us a pubescent, boys-eye view of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and of
the modern dysfunctional American family. It’s Tom Sawyer without
Huck Finn and the Mississippi River—a boy living a complicated,
sometimes secret life underneath the radar of the self-involved
adults all around him.
A worthy companion to The Last Byline,
The Oaks leaves the reader wanting to go back and read what
happens to Charlie when he grows up.
Lindorff is co-author of "The Case For Impeach-ment," and a
widely recognized investigative journalist whose column is carried
on
http://thiscantbehappening.net
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